


Working Title

by SoloShot



Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age - All Media Types, Dragon Age II, Dragon Age: Inquisition, Dragon Age: Origins
Genre: F/F, F/M, Gen, M/M, Magical Realism, Modern Girl in Thedas, Multi, Other, Unreliable Narrator
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-06
Updated: 2019-03-06
Packaged: 2019-11-13 01:01:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,512
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18021869
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SoloShot/pseuds/SoloShot
Summary: Falling into a Videogame? ✔️Meeting my Favorite Characters? ❎Being Anywhere Near The Plot? ❎Being Important? ❎Getting powers you hate and don't understand? ✔️Shitting In Buckets because People In Ferelden apparently haven't invented plumbing! ✔️☹️Helping Save The World?! ❔





	Working Title

**Author's Note:**

> MGIT. Will it go well, probably not. Drop me a line if you like it, ignore me if you can't stand it, and if you have suggestions for the non-existent plot or good forbid wanna beta read lmk. 
> 
> My only real goal is to have a realistic person experience unrealistic things and also make it fun to read. Any depth is accidental I assure you.

It has been realities usual preference that when strange beautiful women fall through tears in the fabric of the universe, the existential paradigm of “good tv" kicks in. That is, generally speaking, when events which fuck with the very fabric of nature happen they tend to occur; firstly in front of an audience, secondly with great fanfare, and usually with at least one future lover making some sort of quip about “women falling from space time portals what an oddity" (although the specifics tended to vary depending on genre).

However on this day, in this particularly spatially and temporally warping little portal adventure, the generic universal rules for “what makes good tv" were not in effect when Arianna Gaunt landed headfirst in a snowbank somewhere in the backwoods of the Ferelden Frostbacks. 

“Ow." She said through a mouthful of snow, which considering what was currently happening in her life was probably an immeasurable understatement.

There was a pause and then a small explosion which sent our erstwhile heroine soaring ass first out of her new snowbank home and right into another larger and somehow even more aggressively dense snowbank than the first. How it had happened, she couldn't rightly say.was it magic? Was it Maybelline? Only time will tell one supposes. (Spoilers it's not a so-so mascara brand opening Eldritch portals or causing semi magical explosions because that my dears is a different genre entirely).

She lay for a moment, sprawled on her new snowbank, face to the sky and trembled. A sickly green glow roiled in the sky over the mountain peaks in the distance, huge chunks of earth and stone slammed together with a force that set her teeth on edge and although she could not hear it she could feel it in the air. Taste it in the back of her throat like rotten food and sulfur.

“Holy shit." She whispered into the still forest. “That's the breach!" 

And so it was, albet God only knew how far away. Although the rent in reality was readily visible, judging by the tiny specs plunging out of it (Demons?!) It had to be many, many, many miles away.

It was about this moment Ari remembered that every single time in the game someone had fallen out of a portal, a rift, giant baby eating demons tended to be right up in its business. With what was probably the adrenaline rush supplied by a small heart attack Ari heaved herself out of her snowbank and to the ground. Her hiking boots found easy purchase as she scrambled to find some kind of cover in the nearby treeline. 

She spent another breathless second desperately searching the ground for something, anything, to defend herself with before the sound caught up with her. 

The sound, that is, of undisturbed nature. The evergreen forest around her towered, the trees staggeringly tall and wide as if this old growth forest had never seen the bad end of a logging crew. Huge fluffy white snowflakes drifted slowly on a calm breeze and aside from one nearly frozen woman and the two imprints of her body she'd left behind absolutely nothing was happening. No demons, no rift, no soldiers or mages, just her gulping breaths and swimming head.

After a few moments Aria slowly stood on legs that knocked her gloved fingers clutching the hem of her heavy winter coat. This whole situation was so fucking off the wall weird, one minute she was on a hiking trip in Western Washington and then here she was face and then ass first in a snowbank in a mountain range in a fakey fake world. 

“What the-" she began when a loud popping noise, not that unlike someone popping a bottle of champagne open, reverberated above her. 

Her head snapped up in surprise and a large metal staff slammed into her face at approximately a million miles an hour breaking her nose with a crack and sending her back on her ass-

\-----

Three Days Later

So the good news Ari thought to herself is that I'm not anywhere near the breach. 

Ari prodded at her swollen nose and bit back a snarl as it throbbed under her fingers sitting back on her heels as she took stock of her situation yet again. She'd tried to reset it herself based off the pictures in her hiking manual but considering she'd passed out from the pain and she had no way of actually looking at the damage she was probably going to have to call that particular endeavor a bust. As far as she could tell her breathing was still fine and while the taste of blood might never come out of the back of her mouth at this point, at least she was alive.

Well alive and possessed of both her backpack, her clothing, and a large matte black metal staff with intricate carvings banded about it's solid surface that made her head swim when she looked to hard at them (which she tried not to do because this universe DID have Eldritch horrors and she didn't want to get Cuthulud on account of bad planning and a wandering eye). 

The first thing she'd done after she'd shaken off the stupor of getting hit in the head was try to chuck the damn thing into the woods. She'd narrowly avoided getting hit again by diving inelegantly out of the way when it boomeranged back at her and landed ramrod straight inside of the snow behind her vibrating with the force of it's landing. 

Not one to be put off by failure she'd tried six more times in the last three days, once off a cliff and once into a mountain lake, to get rid of the damn thing but each time it came back (thankfully without hitting her again). She'd eventually given up and simply strapped it to her backpack and decided to ignore it. 

Sure it was probably magical and important or something but magical and important didn't mean “will feed me and keep me from freezing to death on a mountainside”. And Aria had found very quickly to her own distaste that this was not a dream and freezing to death was a legitimate concern. 

At first she'd used the “you just got lost excuse - just get back to camp and go home and forget this, that green swirly thing in the sky is just a hallucination” but when night had fallen and her camp wasn't anywhere nearby she'd had to huddle under a copse of trees and admit that at the very least she was really fucking lost. Which in backpacking was as dangerous as a bad fall or a broken anything. Even in the 21st century getting lost this far from civilization was almost a sure death sentence for someone unprepared.

Then she'd pulled her map and compass out intent on trying to pinpoint the North Star. She figured if she could do that she could try to make for the nearest highway in the morning. It only took a few depressing minutes to discover that even though the breach (still glowing and ominous in the distance) was blotting out a large section of the sky there wasn't a North Star to be found. No little Dipper either, or Orion and his belt, not even the spill of light that made up the milky way. Their were stars in that night sky, but not a single one of them was hers. 

So she'd moved into “dream" only to discard it as the sun rose again because in a dream you don't have to take a shit behind a bush and wipe with a strange unidentifiable leaf while you try not to faint from thirst. She'd settled on “coma" for a bit and spent a few hours trying to hurt herself badly enough she'd wake up. Desperation had gotten to her at some point and she'd screamed and screamed until her throat went raw.

And then she took all of that fear, bottled it up, and shoved it into a little mental corner designated “I'm just not dealing with this right now, it's just too goddamn much". 

Right now she had more important things to do, like survive long enough for any kind of crisis to matter. After all you can't dramatically tear at your hair or fling yourself from the battlements out of misery if you died in the woods alone and unmissed. 

And that, that was a real danger right now. In the three days Ari had been slowly picking her way down the mountain she hadn't seen even a glimpse of anything remotely human. A few small animals and what she thought was maybe a herd of Halla across the previously mentioned lake where her new staff friend was supposed to have met a watery grave. 

So she'd decided that being upset by the circumstances of what was going on was falling by the wayside and trying to get some damn food was now the main priority. 

She didn't have a bow or a gun at the moment, she hadn't thought she'd need them when she'd left. This solo backpacking trip was supposed to have been a week alone with her thoughts and the beauty of nature (plus the giant sack of weed at the bottom of her bag because nothing beats getting absolutely blazed in the middle of excellently beautiful nature, but this is a PG-13 sort of story so we won't dwell on it). It was supposed to have been her time for self reflection in the wake of a tumultuous year. A celebration of the Master's degree in Literature she'd just achieved, a moment of peace before she was supposed to start TA-ing a summer course in Shakespeare. She'd even brought a well read volume of the Bard's most famous works to peruse at her leisure to better prepare herself for a semester of bored GenEd students whose favorite type of The Great Shakes was the version of him that was just a shitty BBC adaptation.

So suffice to say she didn't have anything on her that made hunting easy. What she did have was a spool of wire and a survival manual which had an entire section on snares plus an will not to die which was really the strongest part.

Her first attempts had been crude, mediocre, but ultimately fruitful. 

“Could this be any weirder?" She asked herself as she cut the wire of her snare with a snap releasing the...whatever the hell it was. The animal she'd managed to catch was roughly the size and shape of a rabbit, could even have passed for one if it didn't have fangs and four eyes. 

“Sure I realize the flora and fauna of this fake ass videogame world probably isn't the same as mine but damn bunny did you have to look so-” she paused as bunny slowly swung like a pendulum in her hands it's fearsome face finally rotating away from her,”so gross. I have to eat you why couldn't you look normal?”

Gross dead bunny didn't respond, typical. She sighed and slung the carcass over her shoulder as she walked, she had two more snares to look at before she trudged back to her pseudo camp for the night hopefully she'd find another not bunny. 

\---

Spoilers, she did not find a second horror bunny. 

\---

Her camp, if she could even call it that, was tucked up on the edge of a small sluggish creek in what Aria assumed was once an animals burrow. The small bare patch of earth had been clawed into a space under the roots of an old tree and was semi exposed to the weather, likely why the animal had given up and found somewhere else. The floor was dry, at least, and when Arianna had piled a few evergreen boughs over the opening and across the back of the space in a makeshift bed it began to seem almost homey.

She settled her catch down on the ground and began the arduous work of making a fire. Which, as always, was nowhere near as easy as they made it out to be in everything ever. Luckily she'd had her flint and steel tucked into the same pocket as her water bottle (now frozen) on the outer mesh pocket on her backpack. As a result it only took her an hour and one breakdown before she actually managed to light anything.

Once she had the fire going steadily she set about dismembering the horror bunny. That at least was the same as she'd always remembered it. It didn't take long before she had strips of horror bunny roasting happily over the fire. 

She'd made the wise choice, in her opinion, of removing all the organs and refusing to eat them or even look to hard at them. She didn't need to know just how deep the horror went and even then entrails weren't her favorite even in non horror animals. It was best not to risk poisoning any more than she already was eating strange horror meat. 

She clambered to her feet and paused to stomp her feet and clap her hands a little trying to invite a little more warmth in her extremities before she stepped out into the snow again. The games had done a decent job of showing the differences in weather in the many places it took the player but it was something wholly different to feel that weather yourself. The Frostbacks had always seemed cold in the game but it hadn't managed to really press just how cold it actually was outside. 

Aria had been really, really fucking lucky to have been cold weather backpacking when whatever the hell happened to her had happened. She was almost as prepared as anyone literally could be in this situation. Her hiking boots were high topped and sturdy, her long johns warm and insulated under her sweater and jacket, hell she even had a beanie on under her hood. Not even all this could keep her teeth from chattering or her fingers and toes from feeling a bit numb even under her gloves and socks. Not to mention her red runny nose. 

She really felt bad for the people living in the Frostbacks right now if this was their everyday all year around. Really, really, really bad.

She sighed and scooped up horror rabbits innards and peered outside. The sun had set in the last few hour and although it was quite dark outside the light from the moon intermixed with the sickly glow of the breach was quite enough to see by once her eyes had adjusted. 

She clicked her tongue in distaste as she surveyed her utopian kingdom of ice and misery. It had started snowing again and even as she watched the snow banks were beginning to grow. 

“Ah hell." She muttered, that kind of snowfall was going to be an absolute bitch to get through. She looked down at her handful of horror bunny and sighed as dramatically as she could. Horror bunny innards had to be disposed of unless she wanted to just sleep with the worry of a bear or something barging in and trying to eat her on the basis of “smells like dead stuff mmmmm gotta eat it" that seemed to drive some animals. 

So outside she had to go to bury her horror bunny with full honors. After a moment of deliberation she crouched down and unsnapped the staff from the webbing on the back of her backpack where she had been storing it for the last three days. It would do well enough as a walking stick to help her navigate the snow regardless of it's possibly Eldritch nature. 

The black staff didn't do anything as she hefted it in one hand so after a few moments she set out taking a meandering course down the length of the creek. She'd walk for a few minutes, she mused, and then turn around and go back after a short but honorable burial for the remainder of tonight's meal,and hopefully horror bunny skewers would be warm and waiting. Cooked to smokey barely edible perfection. She couldn't wait! (Not)

So she meandered pausing every so often to take in the Forrest or to glance up and into the distance where the breach, blocked from visibility by the height of the trees, floated somewhere in distance.

She hadn't really, well thought about what she was going to do. Sure she had imagined waking up in a video game, or a movie, or a manga, or an anime. Hell she sometimes daydreamed about going on America's got talent and suddenly being an amazing singer and winning and being on the cover of ever magazine ever, but never in any of her dreams had she wondered what if about this scenario. Her daydreams were always strictly fantasy, and when she said fantasy she meant it. Aria in her daydreams was brave, beautiful, strong, and special. She always had extra cool magic or fell in love with her favorite character, or spent hours imagining scenarios where she did something super cool and they admired her. She never imagine getting dumped out in a fantasy world alone and nowhere near the cool characters or world shaking events. 

If she had planned this little Thedas adventure she'd have replaced the Herald maybe, or probably just been cool enough to mysteriously fall out of the rift right into their laps and become instant friends with Varric or something. She'd be a rogue probably and have cool epic daggers or maybe a badass sword and shield like Cassandra. 

Instead she was burying horror rabbit beside a creek and hoping to find enough civilization she could take a shit in a bucket instead of just the woods before she had a mental breakdown. Oh and she got a weird metal staff with Eldritch carvings instead of a cool sword, and a broken nose.

She stopped next to the river and began burying the remains of horror rabbit as she thought. It really wasn't what she would call her favorite scenario but at least she wasn't dead or eaten by demons. Everything else she could manage given time and appropriate coping mechanisms. Maybe Call Royalx had some kind of pseudo therapist she could hire someday to talk all this through.

Somewhere to her left a sharp panicked cry rent the woods, a human cry. 

Arianna sprung to her feet stumping slightly as she went in her hurry. She had just heard someone nearby, but they were screaming. She lept towards the noise scrambling up the embankment of the creek where it likely swelled to every year as the winter snowmelt fed the rivers and then dashed forwards. The cry had sounded nearby, and panicked, she probably didn't have much time. 

Another scream and Aria began to furiously run, arms pumping the metal staff gripped in a white knuckled grip in her left hand. Branches whipped at her body leaving fine lines of red on her exposed face. she nearly lost her beanie to an overhanging branch as she ran, barely clapping her free hand to it to prevent it from falling. She snatched at it and shoved it into her coat pocket as she ran her breaths harsh and wet in the cold night air. As sounds of a fight grew louder and louder she swore and gripped the staff with two hands. 

She wished she had time but she needed to help and she wasn't a great planner in real life.

Then there was no time to think! She barreled through the undergrowth into a small clearing. She took the tableau in with a critical eye for the barest second before she struck. 

Two men standing, one on the ground hands held up as if to ward off a blow, a fourth still on the ground unmoving. One of the men standing turned towards her and she gripped her staff in both hands and swung wildly aiming for his midsection but hoping for his head or dick. 

Something peculiar happened when she swung, pinpricks of static lifted the hairs on her arms as something surged from within her cool and calm rolling down through her hands and into the staff. The black metal stuck the man in his solar plexus and then he snapped back flung away from her like a ragdoll slamming into a large evergreen with a sickening snap. 

She froze for a heartbeat, staring in abject shock at the man's crumpled form her ears ringing. The world seemed distant, fuzzy, absent as she stared at him, she was sure she had killed him. His head was lolling at an odd angle and his chest wasn't moving. She wanted to throw up, she wanted to die, she hadn't meant to!-

Something huge and heavy slammed into her back sending her to the snow covered ground.

Was this a rescue or had she just gotten herself reverse ambushed?

 

\-- End Chapter 1 --


End file.
